The Top 5 Reasons It’s OK If Your Beauty Brand’s YouTube Channel Sucks

Most brands don’t realize that it doesn’t matter if their own YouTube channel sucks. They think of their YouTube channel like the storefront on their physical locations and spend lots of money making it look good and buying low-engagement vanity views on pre-roll videos.

This is a common misconception, but it gets the main strength of YouTube all wrong.
This article on Digiday totally misses the point when it says that “Sephora has more than 300,000 subscribers on YouTube, trumping competitors like Ulta Beauty, which has 12,000.”

Certainly, subscribers are a good indicator, but despite Sephora’s 300k subs, the channel is only getting an average of 6,000 views on non-paid videos.

Top 5 reasons why it’s OK if your YouTube channel sucks:

1) Views don’t matter, it’s engagement

Officially branded videos often get their viewcounts artificially inflated because they’re being used as paid pre-rolls. But these are very low engagement views. Basically, engagement on YouTube is determined of the percentage of total likes and comments per view. This isn’t TV, and if people aren’t liking or commenting on the video, they’re showing that they aren’tinterested. A paid media view has a much lower value than an organic view because a paid viewer might only watch for a few seconds. Check your audience retention graph to see what we’re talking about.

2) Sadly, brand views are ⅔ paid

The views on any branded beauty channel are paid views, often TV commercials shoehorned into a medium where they just don’t fit. Again, this isn’t TV, and people are just one click away from leaving. Those paid views often only represent 5 seconds of view time, and that includes even the forced 30-second pre-rolls because people will just click off and view another video. If people are not liking and commenting on YouTube, they’re not truly watching.

3) YouTubers beat brands every day

Shoppers and regular YouTube watchers love watching beauty gurus talk about brands because they provide authentic product reviews, demonstrations, and opinions. And while Sephora does a good job of producing “how-to” videos to help consumers, like with this video “How to Contour for Fuller Lips,” they got 80% of their 60k views from paying people to watch. The paid budget was perhaps $2,500 for distribution of this video, plus production:

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The official Sephora video was quite good by brand standards — it offered practical how-to information that was very useful, and it got a 0.5% engagement rate. But this authentic, non-paid video by YouTuber Candace Sheppard, called “Sephora *NEW SHADES*** Matte Cream Lip Stains 2015 Lip Swatch & Review,” all 30,000+ organic views were from very interested and engaged shoppers. It got a 3.2% engagement rate, 6x that of the Sephora video:

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And here’s another YouTuber video about Sephora, “Sephora Haul — February 2015,” by Jaclyn Hill, that has more than a million views:

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4) Paid views are increasingly getting blocked

Brands are largely relying on paid views on their own channels. But YouTube shoppers are increasingly blocking paid ads. According to a recent study by Adobe/PageFair, 45 million Americans block YouTube ads, and that number is increasing at 48% per year. So if brands don’t seek non-paying methods to promote their brands, they will be speaking to an increasingly smaller, less-savvy audience.

5) Over-produced means inauthentic

When shoppers go to YouTube, they’re looking for the impartial third party. On YouTube, TV-quality production can give the impression that the videos are not trustworthy. But you don’t have to believe us — just look at the engagement rates of YouTubers vs. official beauty brand videos.

So instead of focusing on your own channel, it’s best to focus on connecting with YouTubers — they know what the consumer wants to see — and it costs the brand a lot less.

Start a movement — connect with your YouTube influencers today. We can help.